


Into the Waters

by sebald



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-25 02:22:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12026085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sebald/pseuds/sebald
Summary: Justin is haunted by a dream that keeps slipping away.(Or, Alaska doesn't get into Season 5 and things fall apart. Or maybe into place. One of those.)





	Into the Waters

i.

The sand is wet and cold under his feet, but the sea has receded far away. Justin follows it, possessed with the need to submerge his feet in water. The discomfort of having moist sand between his toes is overwhelming, driving him farther and farther out, until behind him is only a horizon of sand, no indication of where he had started.

The farther he walks, the deeper he sinks into the ground. It’s halfway up to his knees now, and what looked like sand discolored by the waters is now feeling and looking more like tar. But the waters are ahead of him, so he attempts to push on.

_Morning, pumpkin_. The words bleed into the otherwise silent beach. He feels the greeting wash over his nape, Aaron’s voice raspy with the earliness of the day. The waters rapidly curl farther away, until Justin has to squint to even see. When he opens his eyes fully, it’s to a dirty white wall and unwashed curtains, Cerrone bundled in a pool of excess fabric.

There’s no sand. No water. His dream had collided with the solidity of Aaron. All his dreams do. And they all fall off the edges of his mind, away into the morning. He closes his eyes again, searching for the waters to run his feet through. But there is nothing.

For the moment, nothing else exists but the softness of the bed, and Justin, and Aaron’s warmth wrapped around him. Nothing—not the night before, not the day ahead, not the house falling apart around them.

Justin knows this should be enough.

ii.

_I’ll see you_.

Justin waits, shaking hands tight on the steering wheel, but Aaron leaves it at that, no indication of _when_. Justin could ask, of course, but it’s 7:33 a.m. and he’s already been late thrice this week and the day is long and he’s not even sure that Aaron really knows the answer. Justin himself doesn’t really count the days by the calendar anymore. He shouldn’t expect Aaron to, especially not when he’s flying across time zones.

The days all just pass him by. He remembers them by deadlines at work—today is toothpaste presentation day. If not by deadlines, then by Skype meetings with casting directors. Those had been the focal points of the last few months, taking precedence even over his actual paying job. Today marks twenty-seven days since the final meeting. _Until next year, hopefully? It’s just not the right time_ , they had said, hoping to placate him. He’s heard the same thing, word for word, for five straight years.

There was a time when the rejection had lit a fire in him. But you can only keep aflame for so long until you burn out.

Hands still on the wheel, he leans to kiss Aaron and watches him go, pulling two suitcases full of drag into Pittsburgh International.

The last time Justin had been in a plane was when he moved back from Los Angeles. That had taken three suitcases—one for his clothes, two for Alaska’s. He thinks of the beaches of California, his tiny old apartment, that first disastrous audition. Moving states had not changed that. There are beaches in Pittsburgh. That should be enough.

Justin makes it to the parking lot by 7:58 a.m. Just enough time to run up to the third floor and beat the head of the art department to the office. He reaches into the backseat for his bag and his mock-ups for a lame toothpaste ad. “Smile in style,” the guy from the copy department had instructed him to write, the quiver in his voice betraying his thoughts on his own his slogan. Justin had almost felt bad for the guy. They were both just trying to get through the week.

He unrolls one sheet and stares at his own drawings smiling up at him. Their mouths look too stretched out. Smiling faces have never been his strong point, preferring the sensual slopes of pouting lips. He rips the poster apart and throws it out on the pavement.

He sits in the car, leaving the rest of his work on the passenger’s seat and contemplating the half-empty pack of Pall Malls on the dashboard. They leer at him, baiting him like they were a challenge. And he’s never been one to say no. He was a people pleaser, his high school English teacher had once told him. Only he wasn’t always a good judge of which people needed pleasing.

By 8:32 he’s made his way back home, a stick in one hand and a can in the other. He calls in to tell his boss that he’s sick, and his boss tells him that he’s been late exactly sixteen times the past month and that he’s fired.

Justin appreciates a clean break. He’d take it over getting strung along and being made to believe you’re better than you are. He thanks his boss.

Time slips away as he polishes off a row of PBRs in the fridge, the emptied cans forming a delicate tower on the coffee table. He’s up to five when Cerrone hops up and topples the whole thing over. _Maybe six will be your lucky number_ , Aaron had told him. And he trusts Aaron. Sharon. Sharon Needles, America’s Next Drag Superstar. So he opens his sixth can.

Luck, he decides, tastes like stale beer and tears.

iii.

When he wakes up the next afternoon, his first order of business is to delete his e-mails, all six hundred pages of it, and his Skype account. And then he proceeds to clear the internet of Alaska Thunderfuck—first on MySpace, and then Twitter, and then Facebook, until only the website is up. There’s not much on it, just pictures, most of them from his days in Los Angeles, and a link to a free download of “Trannies Are Fierce” in lurid, flashing letters. It’s been downloaded a whopping eleven times, one of those being Justin himself, just to check if the link did work.

It takes him fourteen beers to finally clear the website. And then just one more after that to pack all his drag away.

iv.

He’s chasing after the receding tide again, only this time, it’s not far from him at all. It’s just a foot or so from his feet, but as Justin runs toward it, so it moves away from him. It surges forward now and then, just enough to make him feel the cool waters that he’s missing, only to pull back again. He runs and runs and runs until his legs give out and he drops to the sand, only able to watch as the waters disappear into the distance.

When he wakes up, he heads for the fridge and finds that there’s nothing left for him to drink but water.

Later, he drives out to a local Goodwill. In his backseat and his trunk sits Alaska, seven years of her existence packed away in boxes and plastic bags. Justin can almost pretend that he’s saying goodbye to someone else.

He supposes he could have left something for Aaron, for Sharon, but what could you give a person who has it all?

The attendant, a small bespectacled lady with greying hair, rifles through the wigs and dresses and looks up at him to ask if he’s from a theatre company. Justin smiles and says he could have been if he were a better actor. She pats his hand and tells him he’s young.

When his mother was twenty-seven, she already had two kids and another on the way. He comes home to a cat that’s not even really his.

Aaron calls him and asks why he’s gone and deleted everything, if he’s doing all right, if he wants to come fly out to Florida with him. Justin doesn’t have answers to those questions, so he settles on asking Aaron when he’ll come home. Five days, Aaron promises.

Justin walks up to their kitchen calendar. He counts five boxes and writes _welcome back_ on the last. And then he writes _I’m sorry noodles I love you I’m sorry_ across the week below that.

v.

Four days of sobriety is not much, but it’s a personal feat. He cleans out his savings account and takes just one bag of clothes with him. He wills himself not to look back as he leaves Cerrone behind. A proper goodbye will have to be made sometime. He owes Cerrone that.

He sleeps through most of the flight. Dreamlessly, for once.

When he wakes up, he sees the waters of the Pacific bordering California. It’s an endless stretch of blue, and Justin knows it’s not going away.


End file.
